Who is a Data Scientist ? What is Data Science ?
Data Scientist:
Data Scientist is a Magician, Mutant… just kidding :), but some employers expecting magical outcomes from Data Scientist. At the same time some employers titled ‘Data Scientist’ for the employee who is developing Business Intelligence report. These are the facts that I am observing in USA and the world following the same pattern. Even in Silicon Valley, some of the world’s leading technology companies calling report developers as a Data Scientist, which is fundamentally wrong.
What are the key responsibilities of a ‘Data Scientist’ ?
One of the key responsibility of a Data Scientist is to tell the Business Executives about the flaws in current Business Activities and guide them towards right decision making abilities to improve the business performance.
Wow, telling business what to do ? Then what kind of capabilities and skills the Data Scientist should demonstrate ? The answer: experience in Business Domain, Statistics, Predictive Modeling, Data, Technology stack such as SAS, SPSS, R, Python, Spark, Scala and so on.
Data Science:
Now, you may be thinking about ‘What all the things that Data Scientist should do?’ before telling business what to do? How to find current flaws in the business ? How to conclude what is going to work to improve the business performance ?
The answer is – Data Scientist should understand the DATA, relate the DATA to the business, use statistics knowledge, deploy effective models on the DATA using the earlier mentioned technology stack, compare accuracy of the predictions, finalize the best possible model to solve a business problem and productionize the solution.
That’s why my friend, many companies are searching for Ph.D.’s in stats with business and technology experience for their Data Scientist roles :)